Exclude such hybrid hypotheses, rule out every reason obliquely astronomical-geological. Will man, left to himself, to his resources biological-psychological, live as long as the earth’s conditions, left to themselves, permit him to?
Facts are here outnumbered by fancies, more fanciful than those of the stargazers or million-mumblers. We know even less of our own nature than of the mystical nature of Number; of our own bodies than of the heavenly; or where they come from, or whither they go. The time element, a large difficulty when treating of suns and planets, becomes a fatal one when seeking to prognosticate for men, who obey less known laws and move at less mensurable speeds, who need smaller time for bigger changes, whose souls elude the clock. The direction factor fails also. The earth’s, and the sun’s tolerably, are known. Man’s, if he has one, is not.
Shall we perish before we must? No answer is available; only strange contending prophecies, sharp rival conjecturalities. …
The race grows ever stronger and more viable.
Physically. With better and more regular food, better and less hostile conditions of every kind, the stamina of the species is constantly improving. Disease is being conquered; one cruel malady after another has been driven from the body, and those still resisting will be broken. In the foulest slum-tenements of this Gilded Age fewer babies now die than in king’s houses three centuries ago—what then of the Golden Age, slumless, soon to follow, when all houses shall be royal, and in none of them, as now, infanticide practised? Nor parricide: the old will live to be older, and happier and healthier and usefuller in their age; the generations will overlap for longer, strengthening the forward rhythm of human continuity. Long ago we got rid of tails, brutish foreheads, simian jaws; next, our absurd hands and feet and genitals, inadequate instruments of infinite yearnings in art and movement and love, in their turn will go or be transmuted. Whatever the future of eugenics, natality controlled and perfected not by blind instinct but by instinct and intellect working wide-eyed together, it will be better than its past. It has no past. Even without it, we’ve come far. When the creature of Piltdown shambled through the Sussex jungles, tiger was no less tiger than today, and the orangutan and the gibbon, who since have learnt no more, had learnt already to stand upright. While they ever since have marked time, the human average of health, beauty and functional fitness has marched on to where we now stand, upright in body and soul, beholding them face to face to love our women, looking no more at the ground but at the sky to know our world. Because conscious, future progress will be swifter, in half the time covering double the distance between Piltdown and Nineteen-Thirty; thence running forward on a swift straight track unto the goal, triune and shining, of perfect health, perfect strength and perfect beauty.
Intellectually. It is a demonstrable, measurable fact that man’s brain, instrument and symbol of his superiority over his animal forebears and contemporaries, has grown and is growing in size, complexity, adaptability. In power and promise of power it has outdistanced the brain of every other creature and every other organ of man’s own. By it he increases his stock of knowledge and his capacity to hold and use it, his individual memory and the race memory, his personal intelligence and all the people’s. Since the anthropoid parting—nay before—intellect has been curbing instinct, canalizing it, transfiguring it. Inventors, innovators have appeared, challenging the rigidity of ignorant, immovable custom; men with more brain than their fellows, whose brain-average moves at last upward to theirs; great men—and there were no great monkeys. Through great men the race grows greater; as it grows greater, the proportion of great men grows also. The good movement gathers momentum. If the peaks of intelligence are higher, much more so, in comparison, the plains. If civilization levels, it levels up. And when at last the chemical causes of cerebral energy are fully understood, and the brain can be improved at will, then the rate of intellectual augmentation will soar swiftly, and in a few centuries, years, hours—what is time?—carry the race far skyward. Ye shall be as gods.
Morally. Make every admission of present ugliness and evil; how much uglier and eviller the past! Are not the high ideals man today can aspire to, the fair deeds he is capable of, beyond any his forest forebears knew? Who can gainsay that, once beholden, the vision of the beauty of holiness has been driving Satan steadily back; that, through Christ’s example and sacrifice, goodness and mercy have ever since, however slowly, been gaining ground—as, on His death-night, assassins everywhere trembled; as, on His birth-night, every sodomite throughout the world was suddenly cut off? Who can deny that more hopefully than in jungle days, or Jurassic days, the balance between good and evil, happiness and suffering, now tilts? Compare the red tooth and claw of the grey twilight with the warming kindness and comradeship of noonday; caveman culture with Christian civilization; Galilean Man with the Man of Galilee. Consider Tertiary ethics, the dinosaur comity of nightmare; consider the loveliness of poetry, of aspiration, of altruism—of Love—at their present loveliest. Only a fool or a knave or a traitor to humanity in its slow but glorious upward march can deny that the march is upwards.
And if so much has been done in the little time since men were upon the earth, what shall not be achieved in the unfolding aeons ahead? At the worst, our far-off descendants—our measureless superiors in bodily vigour and bodily cunning, in will and brain, in moral courage and moral worth, in gladness and grounds for gladness—will be able to postpone almost indefinitely the end, then radiantly to live the last ounce and instant that cosmic conditions
